Featured Presentations

Technology Connection Keynote

Technically Funny: Technology Don McMillan

A stand-up comic, writer and actor, Don McMillan will bring his "Application Specific Integrated Comedy" to SAS
Global Forum 2011! McMillan has performed more than 300 shows for major corporations around the United States,
including IBM, Apple, Google and Genentech. A former computer chip designer in Silicon Valley, McMillan utilizes
his unique background to take a lighthearted look at computers, technology and the high-tech life. His PowerPoint
slides are like none you?ve ever seen. Don has acted in numerous television shows and commercials, and has made
guest appearances on shows such as The Tonight Show on NBC, CNN's The Larry King Show, MTV's Half Hour Comedy Hour and A&E's Evening
at the Improv. Nowadays, you can catch McMillan headlining comedy clubs across the country. Recently, he was named No. 1 Corporate
Comedian by CBS BNET.

Wednesday Lunch and Feature Presentation*

In this informative and fun-filled action-adventure, Greg Nelson and
Neil Howard will take us on a journey to tell the story of the semi-colon
people  SAS Users  by looking at SAS Global Forum data throughout the
years, including attendance patterns, survey opinions, observations from
volunteers and nearly 10,000 papers and presentations representing topics
ranging from BASE SAS to Sudoku.

The story will be told using SAS, from programs written by SAS users
across the globe, a vibrant, evolving community that stretches geographically
as well as vertically through nearly every industry. From descriptive
statistics to text mining to social analytics, we've explored the reaches of
the SAS Global Forum and its user community to make it better using the
software that brought us together in the first place.

Section Keynotes

In this presentation, we will share some of the experiences in bringing a
diverse set of contributors together to help with the analysis and
presentation of this data and what it took to get the data ready. Topics will
include architecture, data model, technology choices and methods for creating
this resource for our community.

Special attention will be paid to the challenge of data cleansing and
enrichment and how we were able to engage the SAS community in helping us
analyze this data.

Social media may be a phenomenon, but it's not a fad; it has changed the way
people and companies communicate. In blogs, on social networks like LinkedIn and
Facebook, and on messaging platforms like Twitter, users share information about
their work, business and technical issues and the professional challenges that
keep them awake at night.

The IT Services Marketing Association, which tracks the use of social
media by IT professionals and executives with purchasing responsibility, issued
a 2009 report that showed social media usage among this group rose 50 percent
over 2008 and is now in the majority  55 percent said they use social media as
part of the technology buying process in 2009 versus 37 percent in 2008.

This presentation will explore the top trends in social media, the impact
on IT professionals and SAS users, and the analytical tools and technology that
help companies improve products, customer service, marketing and communications.

Phenomenal growth in computational power from 1970 through 2010 enabled a
parallel expansion in linear model methodology. From humble beginnings in
agriculture, linear model applications are now essential in the sciences of
genetics, education and biostatistics, to name a few. Indeed, the meaning of
"linear models" has evolved accordingly. Developers at SAS have been in the
forefront of invention and implementation of these methods at the core of
statistical science. Pathways will be traced in steps of SAS procedures,
beginning with GLM and REG, proceeding through VARCOMP, NLIN, MIXED and GENMOD,
and arriving at NLMIXED and GLIMMIX. Along the way, some problems have
disappeared, new ones have emerged, and others are still along for the ride.